


What You Give

by Miss_M



Category: The Bourne Legacy (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Relationship, Multi, On the Run, Sexual Content, Threesome - F/M/M, Trust Issues, Violence, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-12 09:01:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12955854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “I’m armed, but I’m not here for you. Either of you.”





	What You Give

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celeste9](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/gifts).



> Hope you like it!
> 
> I own nothing.

He watches the thick, black smoke rising above the trees and counts down the few minutes until they emerge into the parking lot. He spots Marta first, but the man, Aaron, spots him before she does. 

A light touch on her elbow, and Marta stops in her tracks, half turns, follows Aaron’s gaze, and freezes. 

He steps out into the open, away from the cover of the parked cars, and shows them his empty hands. 

“I’m armed, but I’m not here for you,” he calls out. His eyes on Marta’s face. “Either of you.” 

“I guess they trained us both well,” Aaron replies. He looks almost amused. “I saw your footprints leading away from the hut, or what was left of it. Couldn’t stick around to find out if you were hunting me, in addition to the wolves and the drone. You track down the good doc too?”

“No. I knew how to find her.” He’s approaching them, slowly, still watching Marta. 

Aaron’s noticed his focus on Marta. Aaron’s posture changes. “Doc? You wanna clue me in?”

She starts to speak, her voice so faint she has to clear her throat and start again. “I know him. Knew him. His name is Peter Boyd, and until eight months ago he lived with me here… back there, at my house.” 

They can all three hear the roar of the fire, but only the two men can pick out the first responders’ sirens in the distance. Soon Marta will be able to hear them too.

He’s close enough now to see Marta’s eyelids are swollen with crying and lack of sleep, that Aaron is still torn between letting him come any closer and shooting him in midstride. He stops, half a dozen paces away from them. The sirens are getting louder. 

“My name is not Peter Boyd. I’m in the same program as your new friend, and those sirens are people who cannot find us here. Any of us.” He gestures behind him, shifts his gaze from Marta to Aaron. “Which one is your car?”

Marta backs up a step, nearly colliding with Aaron. “Oh no. I don’t know what this is, but you are crazy if you think you’re coming with us!”

Aaron’s hand on her elbow, again. They must know each other all of half an hour, and already she turns to Aaron easily, a look passes between them easily. 

It’s the adrenaline, he tells himself, it’s the proximity of death creating a false sense of intimacy. He still has to force his fists to unclench by his sides.

“He’s right, Marta,” Aaron says quietly. “We wouldn’t be standing around talking if he wanted us dead, and we can’t stay here while we hash this out. Come on.”

Aaron guides Marta toward the parked cars, her bewildered, angry look darting between the two men. 

“You’re riding in the back,” Aaron tells him. Like they all know and trust each other. 

The sirens are echoing off the woods and hills around them. Aaron is letting him get behind him and Marta, yet didn’t ask for his gun. 

He gets into the back of the maroon Buick with the Illinois plates, and they peel out, going at the speed limit, just three friends out for a drive.

***

He listens from the back seat as Aaron demands chems, and Marta works through an attack of hysterics, normal in a civilian under the circumstances, and Aaron loses his patience with her and pulls over. She doesn’t know anything, she claims, she just did research.

“I’ve got a plan, and it’s just not that complicated. What I’m going to do is wait for the next person to show up to kill you,” Aaron tells her. “Maybe they can help us.” 

He catches Aaron’s gaze in the rearview mirror. So now it’s the two of them against Marta. How quickly parameters shift. 

“That is, if you’re after the same thing I am,” Aaron tells him. “How about now you fill me in on how you two know each other, other than from the lab.”

He swallows. Here it comes: do or die. “The doctor I checked in with was an old guy, and I don’t need chems,” he says. “I got viraled out a year ago. I figured it out once I left for a mission. There were a few days when I couldn’t take my chems, but there was no cognitive or physical degradation.” 

“Hang on,” Aaron interrupts. “If you’re Outcome like me, how come you got viraled out?”

Marta’s still and silent in the passenger seat, avoiding Aaron’s eye. 

He shrugs. “Every project needs test subject zero. My guess is, they viraled me out first to use me as a control group for the rest of the program participants.” He’s watching Marta’s profile. “I caught a glimpse of you once, through the window in the exam room door. It wasn’t hard to find you in the Sterisyn Morlanta employee database.”

Marta’s twisted around in her seat, staring at him in shock. 

“You really didn’t suspect anything?” he asks her. It isn’t relevant to their chances of surviving the next 24 hours, but he asks her anyway.

“I know you approached me at a bar and told me your name was Peter Boyd,” she says. “I know you took a lot of business trips and were never curious about my work, and sometimes you talked in your sleep in languages that I don’t know. I know that, _Jesus_ , I know that you were really sick before you went away that last time, right before you broke up with me.” 

Aaron scoffs. “You didn’t suspect anything because you didn’t want to. Easier for you that way.”

Marta turns on Aaron, pink-cheeked. “You came to us, didn’t you? That’s what my team was told, that all nine participants were volunteers. You wanted this, the enhancements, what they enabled you to do. So get off my back!”

Aaron gives her a hard look, undoes his seat belt, and gets out of the car. 

Marta stares after Aaron, then looks over at him and opens the passenger door with a frustrated sigh. He gives her a moment to get some fresh air before he follows them both out. 

Marta’s staring incredulously at Aaron when he rejoins them. “You were viraled off greens eight months ago. Why are you still taking green pills?”

“Control,” Aaron and he say, as one. 

“To keep us on a leash!” Aaron looks like he might hit her. 

He moves closer, to get between them if need be. He faces Marta. “You said eight months ago? That’s when they found me out, ordered me to drop you, and reassigned me to Buttfuck, Alaska. They must’ve figured they’d better viral off the others more gradually than they’d done me, just in case every Outcome agent started breaking the rules.”

Aaron’s chuckle is entirely devoid of humor. “And here you looked like such a stickler for the rules, up at Buttfuck.”

He can’t help it: he chuckles too. 

Marta throws up her hands. “Oh my god! This is just great. We’re standing by the side of the road, my house and my life are on fire, people are trying to kill us, and you two are laughing about it.”

Whatever he says to her now, she won’t want to hear it. So he catches Aaron’s eye. “You want to get viraled off blues? You want her to viral you off them?”

“Hey,” Marta snaps. “Don’t talk about me as if I weren’t standing right here!”

She keeps fuming while they establish that live culture isn’t kept anywhere in the United States.

Manila. Christ. 

He’s globetrotted plenty on missions, but never with another agent and a civilian in tow. Then again, the people who made him were never after him before, and both he and Aaron made it from Alaska to Maryland intact.

Marta gets in his face. In her current state, were they alone, it’s a tossup whether she’d try to hit him or kiss him. “Who said anything about you coming with us?”

“They caught up with me in Colorado. I put down one agent, dodged another. If the two of us tracked you, working separately, how long do you think it’ll take them to find you again, with all the resources at their disposal? Your best chance of surviving this is if you are with both of us.”

He doesn’t say that he too stands a better chance with Aaron around to watch his back, and vice versa. Aaron knows, and Marta will figure it out once she’s calmed down. With any luck, they’ll be halfway to Manila by then. 

“I don’t even know what to call you,” Marta says bitterly. 

“Call me whatever you like. You’re June Monroe now, he’s James or Aaron or whoever. It’s all just call signs anyway.”

Marta’s beautiful face twists with something closer to disgust than anger. “Right. Just call signs. And I suppose I was just a mission gone wrong.” 

“You weren’t a mission. But I did miscalculate with you.” He can feel Aaron watching him. “I tried not to fall in love.”

Her whole body starts away from him, her hand rises as though it has a mind of its own. She stops, remembering what they are, what they can do. 

“Go ahead,” he says. “It’ll make you feel better.”

The crack of her hand on his cheek nearly overbalances him. She must have put all the strength in her slim, sedentary body into that slap. He touches his smarting cheek while she stomps back to the car. 

Aaron lays a hand on his shoulder. One thing Outcome agents get trained to do is always to touch with intent. Intent to harm or to control, usually. Yet when Aaron does it, it seems untrained, natural. 

“Come on, man, let’s go,” Aaron tells him. “We should switch cars soon.”

***

He splits off in Manila. Marta protests, like she can’t decide which she dislikes more: having him close by or somewhere she can’t see him.

“If they tracked us, they will send someone. The point of having three people on a team is for one to serve as lookout.” 

“He’s right, Marta,” Aaron says, and she folds without further objection.

None of them give voice to the obvious: that it’s a matter of how soon, not if, they are tracked, given that they departed from a major US airport and one of them had her face on CNN playing on screens at Manila airport. 

Marta and Aaron enter the factory, while he finds a decent location for a nest, with an overview of the street and the rooftops. He keeps his distance even when workers in pink coveralls flood out of the factory gates. When Marta and a sweating Aaron peel off from the crowd and vanish down a side street, he follows. Marta glances back as she supports Aaron, looking for him, but she doesn’t see him, so he pauses briefly under a streetlamp, knowing the risk, until she spots him and some of the tension in her shoulders vanishes. 

He sees them climb the stairs to a cheap sleepover, but he doesn’t follow them inside. He patrols the streets and the roofs, scans the face and body language of every beggar, every tricycle driver, street vendor, beat cop, and carousing student. No one snags his attention, but he knows it’s coming.

Just before dawn, he sneaks up to the room, scratches on the door. Marta opens it, but doesn’t let him in. She steps out and pulls the door shut, allowing him only a glimpse of Aaron sleeping fretfully, bathed in sweat, a water bottle tucked in beside him like he’s a tourist sleeping off a hangover. 

They sit on a bench in the corridor connecting several rooms for rent. The house sleeps around them, but the city sounds like a mountain river, morning rush hour already gearing up. 

Marta looks gaunt in the half-light, her long hair brushing his shoulder as they sit side by side on the narrow bench. She rests her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. 

“Did it take? The virus?”

“I think so,” she says. “He should be fine in the morning. I hope.”

“I’m sorry about all this, Marta,” he tells her. 

She opens her eyes. “If you saw me through that exam room door now, would you do it all the same way again?”

He watches her, and she watches him. He nods yes. 

She shakes her head. “Then fuck your ‘sorry’.”

She speaks without any real heat, of anger or anything else, yet he’s not surprised when she moves closer and straddles him. Takes his hand and pushes it under her shirt, closes his fingers around her breast, pressing down on her own flesh with his hand. 

He tries to kiss her, but she rears back, out of his reach, still astride him. This is not forgiveness, or even desire really. This is stress release. So he grasps what is there, within his reach, lifts her shirt and kisses her breasts because she lets him. He catches her nipple with his teeth, and she makes a noise that is almost loud enough to wake the household before she bites her lip and makes herself swallow a moan. Her hands shake as she undoes her jeans and he slips his hand inside, past her cotton underwear, two fingers inside her, wet and warm. He knows what she likes, and she needs this badly enough that it only takes a minute. She hugs his shoulders as she shudders in silent orgasm, hugs him close like they’re still Peter and Marta who are in love, in their bed in her ramshackle house in the country. 

He puts his fingers in his mouth after she’s done. That may be all he gets from this, but she’s pushing herself up his thighs, her jeans still undone, until she is pressed against him, his aching cock touching her through double layers of cotton and denim. She moves, a rolling wave traveling up her thighs and spine, her hands gripping his shoulders for leverage, and her eyes fixed on his face. She watches him, unsmiling, as he gasps and grabs her hips and rubs off against her. She touches him through his clothes, palms him roughly, and he comes in his pants like a goddamn teenager.

For a moment they sit there, he slumped against the wall and she relaxed and exhausted on his lap, and then they hear Aaron rolling over in his fevered sleep inside the room. 

Marta stands, zips up her jeans, smooths down her shirt, looks at him.

“You should get cleaned up,” she says, not unkindly. 

“I’ll head back out.”

“Do you really think they’re coming?” she asks. She sounds so small and lost he wants to take her face in his hands, and kiss her brow, and tell her it will all be alright. 

“If they follow protocol, they’ll send one man. I’ll spot him before he spots us.” 

Marta stares at him, the flush of pleasure fading from her cheeks. He sees her make a conscious effort to believe him, and she nods and lets him into the room to wash up with bottled water.

In the end, it’s easy: he spots the man from across a crowded square, everything about him just slightly off in a way he knows is true also of himself, of Aaron, of all of them. His stillness, his bearing, the way he moves, how he looks and wears his ‘local’ clothes. 

They spot each other in the crowd, and he leads the chase, away from the rented room, trusting – because he has no other choice but to trust – that Aaron is sufficiently recovered to take care of the Filipino cops.

Through an open market, dodging over stalls laden with fruit and the heads of shouting vendors, across a busy street, up to a footbridge and over to the other side. Marta and Aaron will know to get to the water, to the wharves. 

He takes a hard fall, picks himself up, loops around and back toward the water. He doesn’t know which program the man chasing him belongs to, Outcome or something even worse, but it is luck as well as skill that he manages to wound his pursuer enough to slow him down. 

The man lies bleeding in the street, and people are screaming for the police and running both away and towards him. He doesn’t spare a moment for regret or reflection before he spills the man’s brains onto the asphalt, takes a deep lungful of Manila’s hot, polluted air, and starts running for the wharves.

***

After Manila, Marta no longer watches him warily or with barely suppressed anger. She’s friendly in a neutral way, no warmth or suggestion of intimacy in her demeanor when she examines the cuts and bruises he gained while saving all their lives, or when she passes him a plate of food or sits examining a map with him, their elbows touching, while they travel on the boat which takes them to Palawan and then to Malaysia.

Aaron acts smug over his enhancements being locked into place. They both do pushups on the open deck, while the boatman’s son keeps count in a loud, excited voice, urging them to compete, and Marta pretends not to watch. Aaron talks to the boatman in Tagalog, then ribs his fellow Outcome survivor for not speaking it as well. They get into a competition over who knows more languages – he has Persian and Vietnamese, but Aaron has Russian and Swahili. Marta declares them both ridiculous, but she smiles like the noonday sun on Alaskan snow when she says it. 

They do not linger in Malaysia, find work on a cargo ship sailing east. The ship is Chinese, but the crew comes from all over, most get paid in cash at every port of call, so two strong men and a woman with the title of ‘doctor’ find berths easily. The crew leer over Marta until he breaks some fingers and Aaron knocks out some teeth, then everyone assumes Marta is their woman, that she is shared by her two men, and they take one cabin for the three of them, to preserve the illusion. Marta claims the upper bunk, and the men take turns sleeping on the lower bunk and in a sleeping bag on the floor. 

A rustle wakes him one night at sea. At first he thinks a mouse has got into their cabin, till he realizes it is Aaron moving in the sleeping bag, the rhythmic stroke of his hand on his cock and his labored breathing as he lies on the floor and watches, by the light of the full moon shining through the porthole, the sleeping Marta’s slim hand and long hair hanging off the edge of the upper bunk. 

Marta’s hand twitches in some dream and withdraws from sight as she rolls over, sighing in her sleep. 

He shifts his weight on the lower bunk, and Aaron’s eyes snap to his face, his eyes open in the moonlight. Aaron’s lips are pressed thinly together as he strokes hard and comes, watching him watch Aaron’s hand and cock, Aaron’s hips thrusting up for contact but meeting only air.

They both roll over, their backs to each other, and go back to sleep, listening to Marta’s deep, peaceful breaths.

By the time they reach the western coast of Costa Rica, all three are going stir crazy, for they did not dare go on shore leave much over the preceding weeks. There are eyes in the sky and ears close to the ground even on tiny Pacific islands. Costa Rica is strictly speaking too close to the US, but they’re ready to risk it just to stay on dry land for a while. 

They find a town where tourists are rare. They rent a house with three bedrooms for a song. The men pick up odd jobs. Marta helps out at the community clinic, rigs up an improvised laboratory where she tests urine samples and pap smears, and picks up the most local slang of all of them. They teach Marta to shoot a gun, practicing on tin cans lined up behind their house, but it feels more like a game than life and death. They cook rice and beans in the evening and play cards by the light of a hurricane lamp. He knows, but doesn’t tell Aaron, that Marta sometimes cheats. 

“I don’t believe this,” Aaron feigns outrage. “You’re a cardsharp, doc!”

Marta leans against the back of his chair, laughing, her fingers brushing his shoulder, as she swats Aaron on the arm with a kitchen towel, while he gathers up and shuffles the cards, smiling, watching them. 

He sees them kiss one evening, coming back from the well with water for one last cup of tea before bed. They are standing in the kitchen, lit up golden and dramatic like an old movie poster by the hurricane lamp. At first and for a long moment, only their lips and chests are touching, before Aaron runs his fingers through Marta’s long hair, and she puts her arms around Aaron and presses herself closer with something like desperation, and so, watching them, he is fairly certain this is the first time they have ever kissed. He might give them a little time but the insects are too murderous to linger outside, so he coughs and scrapes the mud off his shoes loudly, and finds them flushed and looking everywhere but at each other.

He puts the plastic bucket of well water in the stone sink, wipes his damp hands on his shorts. 

“I’m gonna hit it. Good night,” he says and catches Marta’s eye and then Aaron’s, nods at them both, and withdraws.

They try to be kind and keep quiet, but he has seen the easy intimacy between them since that day in the parking lot near Marta’s burning house. He can hear them throughout that first night, whether asleep or lying awake. It almost doesn’t hurt to listen to their cries of pleasure, Aaron’s deep groans and Marta’s silvery laughter and the whispered conversation coming from Marta’s room. It doesn’t feel quite like jealousy. 

A week later, Aaron goes to the town’s best-stocked store for some jam cookies Marta likes and a newspaper from San José – they like to keep an eye on the world while hiding from it – and comes back empty-handed and grim. 

“There’s a man watching the _mejenga_ by the post office.”

Marta looks from Aaron to him, her expression confused, then frightened. “What does that mean?”

“It means they found us,” he says. “It means we’re blown.”

“How do you know? How can you be sure?” Marta demands, her tone thin and desperate. Her hands move like she is trying to push their words physically away. She turns on Aaron like she might hit him. “You only saw him for what, a second? It could be anything! It could be someone’s cousin visiting from out of town.”

“It’s Eric Byer,” Aaron says. “I know it.”

A look passes between he and Aaron, and they’re already moving while Marta speaks in a voice growing higher and thinner by the second, still refusing to accept reality. 

He turns and returns to her and takes hold of her arms gently. “Marta, listen to me. This is real. Do you understand? This is real. Pack our passports, the blanks and the ghosts, the money, and make sure your gun is loaded and ready. Then go down through the forest to the rendezvous. Alright?” 

She looks at him like he is doing this on purpose in order to punish her, but she blinks the tears from her eyes and nods curtly, and he allows himself to caress her cheek briefly before grabbing his gun and following Aaron out the door. 

“He probably isn’t alone,” Aaron says as they circle around the town, to a place where they will have cover among the trees while they survey the plaza in front of the church, the handful of stores and bars, and the post office with the dirt field used for soccer games next to it. “We slipped out of Byer’s grasp twice now, he’ll have sent more people this time.”

“Which is why we should get him to come to us himself, and end this once and for all.”

Aaron turns from surveying the town and looks at him. He knew Byer, they both did. Byer brought them into this life and tried to take them out repeatedly. 

Byer made them. 

“How do you wanna send the message?” Aaron asks.

They were trained for efficiency, but they can deploy brutality when they need to. This is why Byer chose them. Their message will look to the locals like gang warfare or a private vendetta. They catch one of Byer’s men in a booby trap, string him up by the legs, cut his throat, and carve the words ‘Déjanos solos’ into his chest with a hunting knife. A taunt as well as a sincere demand, neither of which Byer will be able to take lying down. 

At the rendezvous, Marta runs to meet them, pauses as though unsure which one to hug first, sees the blood on their clothes and hands. Her mouth twists as she heaves her rucksack off her back. 

“Just as well I brought some soap and clean clothes too,” she says.

She listens to their plan calmly, her panic from before replaced by resignation and acceptance. She refuses their suggestion that she go hide with one of her friends from the clinic.

“You once told me that anyone I go to becomes a target,” she tells Aaron. Then she looks at him: “And you came to me, and I worked at Morlanta, and so I became a target long before that day Doctor Foite killed all of our colleagues. I’m staying with you two now.” 

In the end, it’s a kind of controlled carnage. Byer comes, and as expected he does not come alone. Marta kills one of Byer’s team, Aaron and he take out the rest. Aaron’s bicep is grazed by a bullet, but when Byer comes at them at last, Aaron shoots Byer in the leg, and he shoots Byer in the shoulder, and they stand over him as he bleeds on the ground, two guns trained on their erstwhile recruiter, boss, maker.

Aaron says: “You should do it.”

“You sure? Or you just being polite?”

“For god’s sake.” Marta steps between them, raises her gun, aims at Byer’s forehead. “We don’t have time for this weird mutual display of chivalry.”

“Doctor Shearing, listen to me,” Byer says, sounding eminently reasonable even in his current position.

Marta pulls the trigger. Then again. And again. 

She remains motionless, aiming at Byer’s corpse, only her hands trembling with the gun clutched between them, until Aaron lays his hand over hers and takes her gun away. 

“Are you OK?” he asks softly while Aaron secures her weapon. 

Marta shakes her head, wipes her eyes roughly with the balls of her hands. “He killed my colleagues, he took my life from me. We are here because of him. I’ll be OK.”

He reaches over and takes her hand before he can examine the impulse in himself. She lets him take her hand and squeezes his in turn, and he does not examine why she did that either.

***

Two days after killing Byer, they get off the bus in Puerto Limón and book passage on a South African ship bound for Cameroon, Namibia, and Cape Town. They have the whole day till anchors up to kill and find a small hotel near the port, cheap and clean enough.

Aaron’s arm aches a bit where the bullet grazed him. Marta changes his bandage and declares him to be healing nice and fast, just as she would expect with his enhancements. She mutters about gladly giving her wisdom teeth to be able to run a full gene-mapping sequence on them both, while she packs away her first-aid kit.

He half smiles at Marta speaking as her old, scientist self, and turns to go. He might go for a walk, check the imaginary perimeter he drew around the street where their hotel sits. Give Marta and Aaron some privacy. 

“Peter,” Marta says.

He stops dead, his hand on the doorknob. His knees feel like wood as he turns around, slowly, to face her where she stands by the double bed and Aaron sits on it, both of them watching him expectantly. 

He has to swallow twice before his mouth will form words. “Is that my name again?”

Marta tilts her head. “Would you prefer a different one?”

He considers, shakes his head no. 

Marta holds her hands out to him. “Come and lie down. We’re all exhausted after a night on that awful bus.”

Peter distinctly remembers Marta sleeping for over an hour with her head on his shoulder while the bus crawled toward Puerto Limón. Aaron kept throwing amused glances their way from across the aisle, where he sat next to a short fat woman with a cage containing half a dozen live chickens on her lap.

He darts his eyes to Aaron now, and Aaron smiles at him, kicks off his shoes, and lies back, by the wall with the window overlooking the port. Marta lies down beside Aaron, still in her skirt and blouse, and he comes to them and lies down on Marta’s other side. It’s hot and humid, the ceiling fan slowly stirring the air like thick soup. Peter falls asleep faster than he would have thought possible, under the circumstances, Marta and Aaron breathing peacefully beside him, none of them touching very much due to the heat.

He is instantly awake to afternoon shadows on the floor under the window, the air just as hot but a fraction less humid, and the tail end of a whispered exchange between Aaron and Marta. Marta is sitting up beside him, pulling her blouse off over her head, her long, pale back and dark hair all Peter can see. She lies back again, unzips and wriggles out of her skirt and underwear, and glances at Peter, smiles to see him watching her body unfold itself before him like a flower. 

“You slept like the dead, man.”

He looks over to find Aaron naked too on Marta’s other side, though he went to sleep in his travel-stained khakis. Aaron is tanned up top from doing construction and gardening out in the sun, his legs somewhat paler, all over smooth muscle, and a hard cock in his fist. He watches Peter as he strokes himself slowly, then Marta leans over Peter, her hair spilling over his face, her hand resting easy on his chest, over his shirt.

“Take this off,” she says. “And you,” she pretends to glare over her shoulder at Aaron, “don’t joke about being dead, alright?”

Aaron lifts himself up on his elbow so he can kiss Marta’s shoulder. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Is this ambush planned or improvised?” Peter demands, unbuttoning his shirt. 

He knows what this is, the aftermath of a kill, the lingering adrenaline rush of still being alive. He knows that’s not all this is. 

Marta hovers over him, her lush body so close to him, and Aaron lying right there as well. His hands shake only a little, his training kicking in, adrenaline helping him focus, as he removes his clothes.

Marta laughs. “You think it’s easy, living in close proximity with you for months, and trying to remember that we’re not meant to entirely trust each other yet _not_ remember that we used to live together, while you drink tea in just your jeans and wash yourself out in the backyard like you don’t care who sees you?”

He runs his hands over her body, from her hips, up her ribcage, to cup her breasts, remembering her, feeling her. Looks over at Aaron, who’s very close to the two of them now. 

“You two started fraternizing,” Peter says, touching Marta but watching Aaron. “If you were also looking at me, that’s on you.”

Aaron kisses him, quick and light. Peter almost grabs him for more, but his hands are full of Marta and he’s missed her terribly. He keeps trying to look between Aaron and Marta as Marta lies down on top of him, her body so familiar and so thrilling all at once, and kisses him, deep and slow as she used to like to do. She moves her body over his in that smooth, rolling wave he remembers, then sits up and grasps him in her hand and takes him inside her. 

Manila was something else, a moment of anger and bitterness and nostalgia. He’s gone more than a year with no relief, years and years before that with no real relief, or else he never would have risked approaching Marta in that bar or giving in to Aaron’s prodding questions in that cabin, and now here they are, Marta astride him, wet and warm and tight around him, and Aaron watching them, his breath hot on Peter’s shoulder. 

Marta doesn’t give Peter long to crest that first moment, his heels digging into the mattress and sweat prickling on his chest, before she begins to ride him, slow at first, remembering him too, and then fast, panting, her hands planted on his chest for leverage, sweat rolling down between her breasts. Her eyes are closed and her mouth is open, but then she looks down at Peter lying beneath her, and she smiles, and she lifts one of her hands from his chest and caresses his face.

“I’ve missed you,” she says, sounding almost sad, and he has to grip her hips and still her movement for a moment, because he doesn’t want to finish so soon. 

They’re both gasping, looking at each other, suspended unmoving, then Aaron sits up and straddles Peter’s legs behind Marta’s back. Peter didn’t forget that Aaron was there but it’s still a shock to see him heave into view. The weight of both of them is strange and new on Peter’s legs.

Aaron wraps one arm around Marta’s waist, supporting her and himself against her back, and smiles at Peter over her shoulder. The sight of the two of them together, before him, with him, compels Peter to shut his eyes briefly.

When he can look at them again, they’re both waiting for him, eager yet silent and unmoving. 

“Grab her hair,” Peter tells Aaron. “She likes that.” It’s a thrill to think Aaron may not know that.

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not right here,” Marta says, only a little sharply, then she turns her head to look at Aaron. 

“Grab my hair,” she instructs sweetly, and Aaron laughs, and kisses her, and wraps her long hair around his strong hand, and with a short, sharp tug yanks her head back. 

She gasps, flushing all the way down her chest, and Peter thrusts up into her, overwhelmed by the sight. Marta’s head rests nearly on Aaron’s shoulder as Aaron holds her, her neck and back arched, and Aaron slips his hand down from her waist, down to where she is pink and swollen with arousal, her private hair damp, and strokes her till she’s shaking all over. Aaron’s finger brushes rhythmically against Peter’s cock as he thrusts and thrusts, and Peter keeps looking between Marta and Aaron’s faces, flushed and watching him in turn, Aaron’s hand between Marta’s legs, and himself pulsing in and out of her body. He wishes he could be inside them both, both at once, both in turn, Marta and Aaron, Aaron and Marta. 

Marta cries out, and Peter knows her, he recognizes her like this. He thrusts hard and grabs her breasts with both hands, seized by both the memory and the immediate experience of how good she feels as she comes, thrashing on top of Peter, Aaron kissing her neck and fingering her, her hands gripping Peter’s arms, her fingers and thumbs pressed to his ulnae like she’s trying to break his wrists.

Aaron keeps kissing her neck and her shoulder as she twitches and moans, coming down from her high, and he lifts her gently off Peter and lays her down on the bed. 

“Alright?” Aaron asks her, caressing her sweaty face.

“Not yet,” Marta says, breathing heavily, and brushes her hair from her face, her expression all business. “Now you two.”

Aaron looks at him, his lips twitching in a smirk. “I think she wants to watch.” 

Before Peter can muster a response, Aaron bends over Peter’s supine body and takes his cockhead, still glistening with Marta, into his mouth.

Peter swears, and Marta laughs, and Aaron takes him all the way down, bobs his head once, twice, thrice, and Marta is saying ‘oh, oh!’ beside Peter, clutching Peter’s arm like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. 

Aaron pulls off Peter before Peter can grab his head and finish down his throat. 

Aaron’s amused expression spurs Peter to sit up, grab the back of Aaron’s neck, kiss his mouth like he would eat him alive, and shake him, feeling very nearly furious at being teased like this, being ambushed by the novelty and the intensity of the two of them like this. 

“They teach you that in the Army or in the program?” Peter demands. 

“Oh, let’s just say I’m very good at Buttfuck, Alaska.”

Peter’s heart is pounding and he is just about ready to punch Aaron in the face, when Marta starts laughing. She’s rolling on the bed, her hands covering her face, her breasts and thighs shaking with mirth. “Oh my god,” she howls. “Oh my god. I can’t believe you said that. That was…”

“Awful,” Peter finishes for her, still holding Aaron by the back of the neck and looking him in the eye. “Awful attempt at wit. Also, that had better be a promise.” 

Aaron smiles in response, settles himself astride Peter’s thighs, nearly on his lap, and takes hold of both their cocks, pressed together in Aaron’s fist.

“What do you think?” Aaron taunts, stroking rapidly, no more teasing. 

Aaron’s breath is ragged, and Peter can only pant and let it come to him, let it take him, half sitting and half lying down. The sight of Aaron, muscular and sweaty, where Marta was just a minute ago, is almost too much. 

Peter feels Marta moving beside him, sees her run her pale hand up Aaron’s tanned forearm and bicep, feeling the flex and tension in the muscles of the arm jerking them off. Peter feels her lips on his brow, her tongue flicking his temple just by the corner of his eye. He tips his head back to look at her, as she sits up beside the two of them and leans in close so her breasts are just by Peter’s face. He groans, knowing when he’s been defeated, and takes her nipple between his lips, between his teeth, sucks on her soft, glorious breast. He wishes it were Aaron’s mouth on him, Marta’s mouth on him, his mouth on them both, each one of them between the other two in every way possible. Aaron squeezes Peter’s thigh with his free hand while tugging on them both, and they come together, spilling over Aaron’s fist, Marta caressing Peter’s hair, his mouth full of her, his body bucking and shaking in helpless surrender. 

For a moment, they all three slump together, then Aaron nudges Peter with his knee.

“Move over.”

Marta lies down by the wall, embraces Peter as he drags himself to the middle of the bed and collapses, and Aaron stretches out on his other side, his arm lying across Peter’s stomach and his hand resting on Marta’s thigh. Peter rests his head on Marta’s arm, her hair spilling over his shoulder, and thinks how it will never be over. Outcome, the CIA, whoever will come for them again, they’ll never stop, Byer’s death just a reprieve, and the three of them will have to fight and run and keep surviving again and again. 

He thinks that soon they will have to get dressed and get on that ship, and there they will share a cabin again. Somewhere in Africa there will be another house, there will be a bed and a table with three chairs, and all around them streets filled with people. It terrifies Peter, how vulnerable this makes him, makes them all, this predictable soft spot of needing people close by who know him, having to look over his shoulder for their sake as well as his own. 

Marta and Aaron breathe, steady and deep, on either side of him. The vulnerability feels like a kind of armor even as it also makes Peter’s heart skip a beat in sheer terror. The three of them will be together again and again, and Peter has a name again, his name, and he thinks that he will fight for all of that with everything he has for as long as he can.


End file.
